Chapter 23 Reed #2
The giant's pupils are dilated, as if he's reliving the memory. "East of here. The current… it's raging."
The words smack across my mind. The river. The icy, roaring, unforgiving river. The worst possibilities flood my mind: hypothermia, blunt force trauma, his delicate frame tumbling against a rock.
An anger awakens in me, presenting with a cold detachment.
"You watched him jump," I state, my voice flat, the words devoid of all heat.
"I couldn't stop him! He was like a rabbit hopping off the side!" the giant pleads. "I told you what happened! Please let me go! Let me have my ninety seconds! I will never come back! I swear it!"
A sullen chuckle, dry as suckled marrow, escapes my lips. "You misunderstood. There is no head start for killing the only person I love."
His face turns the color of chalk. He understands now.
I flash my scalpel. It's time to teach this dumb motherfucker a lesson.
The first slash is a cut to his right bicep, severing the muscle. A painter can no longer paint. A sculptor can no longer sculpt. A man who held a weapon against what is mine can no longer lift his arm.
He screams, but I cut the sound short as my other hand clamps over his mouth, forcing the sound down to his stomach. I lean in close, my voice a lethal whisper in his ear.
"That was for failing to catch him."
The second slash is to the back of his left knee, the hamstring snapping like a puppet string. A runner can no longer run. A hunter can no longer chase. A man who drove my love to a precipice will never stand on his own again.
A muffled, guttural shriek vibrates against my palm.
"That was for making him choose the river."
I release him and he crumples to the chilled ground, a twitching, pathetic heap of blood and tissue, mewling in the dirt. I look down at him, tilting my head. The beast is sated for the moment. The Gutter has been fed.
"The ninety seconds," I inform him, wiping my scalpel clean against my pants, "start now. Use them to contemplate which pit of hell you want to burn in for the rest of the eternity. You better pray that I find him alive. Otherwise I'll meet you down there and I'll make you wish for hellfire."
I lean down, my breath crawling into his ear.
"Hell has no corner dark enough to hide you from me.
I will find your soul in the void, and I will spend the rest of my existence flaying it layer by layer.
I will sever every nerve that remembers pleasure and re-knit them to only feel agony.
I will peel back your eyelids so you can never look away from what you've cost me. "
I stand, looking at the ruin of him. "You better get moving, my twin sisters are little maniacs."
He whimpers and faces the ground.
I turn to face the last Baptiste, a young man barely out of his teens, shaking so violently I can hear his teeth chatter.
"Deliver a message to your maman for me would you, dear chap.
If you ever want to see the sun rise again, you will tell her this: The Quinns are no longer harboring any mercy.
The next Baptiste who crosses our path will be returned to her in a specimen jar, piece by piece, with a detailed autopsy report listing the twelve distinct, simultaneous causes of their death, from exsanguination to neurogenic shock.
I'll even annotate it in French for her convenience. "
I take a step closer, basking in the scent of his fear—a sweet cologne. "Tell her the Gutter sends his regards. And that he's expanding his practice to include genetic cleansing."
A dark stain spreads down his leg. With a choked sob, he turns and flees, crashing through the pines toward the north.
My sisters emerge from the darkness, their footsteps silent. Alice licks a spot of blood from her thumb. "Is that all, brother?"
"For now," I mutter, my focus turning toward the river. "If Cooper is harmed. Their entire bloodline will soak these grounds. Their flesh fermented in a pit of fertilizer."
"Is Cooper's pulse being tracked still?" I ask my sisters.
They shake their heads ominously back and forth.
Fuck me. Was that thing waterproof? Did it shatter from sheer impact?
Before they can say anything, I take off, a bullet in the night. Racing toward my Cooper. Branches slash my arms and face, opening stinging welts, but I feel no pain.
All I can feel is the emptiness that is swarming in my chest—a vast, howling void, threatening to consume me from the inside out.
It's a colder, darker vacuum than I have ever known.
The thought of a world without his light, without his stupid, brave smile.
Without the sound of him breathlessly calling me Dr. Quinn.
It is a thought that defies gravity. A universe without its sun.
My mind imagines his lonely, treacherous death. The jagged edges of the rocks, his body splattering. I can hear the specific, nauseating sound of a femur snapping under force, a sound I know intimately from the trauma bay.
The water rushing to fill his lungs. I see his alveoli, those tiny, delicate sacs meant for air, forcibly flooded, the membranes rupturing under the strain. I feel the hypoxic seizure that would follow, the frantic, dying fireworks of his brilliant brain as it's starved of oxygen.
No. It can't be.
Cooper. Please be alive. Please. If only the universe were to grant me one wish. I would trade my own beat of my heart for the sound of his.